Systematized Confidence

Nate (the author of the series) describes what a confidence others ascribe to him as what he calls “confidence all the way up”, which is essentially confidence in his cognitive process. With each reasoning step, he is aware of and points to his uncertainty, but he trusts that his analysis is strong, but if that is fallible, then at least his reasoning is strong, but if that is fallible, then… and so on. This reads as confidence to others.

People who lack confidence and are blocked from action by their uncertainties, without a way to reason past them and continue to function. Confidence All The Way Up is thus a more functional mindset to practice.

Confidence all the way up is about working with what you have. It’s about knowing your limitations. It’s about knowing that you don’t have perfect models of “what you have” nor “your limitations”, and proceeding anyway, with an even stride.

It is about trusting in your systems by knowing that even if they fail you, then your backups will recover for you, and even if they fail you, your backup backups will recover for you, and so on.

This allows you to proceed at full speed even with uncertainty (which is ever-present), and without full contingency plans thought through in advance.

This post is part of the thread: Replacing Guilt Cliffs Notes – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.